My Mountain Trail

New Landscape, er Theme

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

This evening I was working from the couch with an old laptop computer brought home for that purpose.  Since I have been trying to improve access to the Marin County lookout calendars, I checked the new pages on this site to see if they were working.  Nope.  I walked over to my main desktop to take a look.  All good.

No, not good.  <RANT warning> What was the deal w/ this old laptop?  Well, it was running IE7.  Now, IE7 is not that far out of date, but it is out of date.  One of the things that I have learned lately is that Microsoft has ignored many of the web design/programming standards that all the rest of the web-world has agreed to follow.  You know, the elephant and all that.  Anyway, it reminded me of what I have learned over the last couple of months:  Microsoft Internet Explorer is a real problem for all of us.

As long as IE doesn’t work w/ the standards agreed on by the recognized “authorities”, it’s just costing us all money.  You may not agree, but then you may not have wasted countless hours designing hacks to make websites look acceptable in IE.  IE8 is much better, but what about those folks that don’t want to upgrade?  Well, the answer is:  Upgrade.  And do yourself a favor and upgrade to Firefox or Chrome.  I lean towards Firefox, but if you want to latch on to the next Microsoft, Chrome works pretty well too.  IE8 works too.  IE8 minus anything is worse, WAY worse, than driving an Edsel.

<RANT warning over>

Anyway, these problems prompted me to load my own theme here.  ”Wadya mean your ‘own theme’?”  Well, since I had to learn html, css, php, and even a little javascript to make the real website work, I decided to start developing my own theme.  I haven’t been that happy w/ the home page slide show and other restrictions, so I have been working on my own theme.  What you see here is as far as I have progressed so far.  As meaningful changes happen, I’ll continue to update the theme.  If you have complaints, let me know.  Maybe I can even make things work better.

This theme, which is much more basic than the one it replaced, works better in IE7.  Well, actually, the buttons at the top may be a bit funky in an older version of IE.  (Hey, if the buttons look funny, upgrade here. It’s FREE.)  It also works in IE8 and, well, all the properly written browsers like Chrome and Firefox (uhm upgrade).

Okay, the rant is really over.  I took a couple of good pics of Cookie today.  I’ll upload them soon…  Night night!